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Summary
A lover of domestic animals, the narrator had had many differnt pets and had lived comfortably in a house with his pets and his wife. Soon, mostly because of the negative effects of alcohol, he began to despise the pets. Previously his favorite, a large black cat named Pluto eventually copied and seemed to mock the narrator so much that the narrator gouged out its eye and hung the cat. That night his house burned down and left a perfect bas relief of a cat with a noose around its neck in the one unburnt piece of plaster in the house. Soon the author wanted company of another cat and found one identical to Pluto, save for a large white patch of hair on its chest. The white patch eventually transformed from an nondescript patch to a gallows as the narrator again becomes increasingly loathful of the cat. One day the cat triped the narrator in the cellar, and the narrator brandishing an axe, swung it to kill the cat. His wife blocked the blow; and, in a rage, the narrator planted the axe in her skull. He walled up his wife in the cellar and, and without the disappeared cat to bother him, finally had a good night\'s sleep--even with the murder on his mind. Police came to investigate but they found nothing. They came back four days after the murder and the narrator took them to the exact place where he had killed his wife. While he is bragging to the police about the solidity of the walls in which his wife is entombed, a loud shriek alerts the police to something behind the wall. The narrator had walled up his cat along with his dead wife.
Introduction
\"\'The Black Cat\' is one of the most powerful of Poe\'s stories, and the horror stops short of the wavering line of disgust\". Poe constructed this story in such a way that the events of the tale remain somewhat ambiguous. As the narrator begins to recount the occurrences that \"...have terrified--have tortured--have destroyed him,\" he reminds the reader that maybe \"...some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than [his] own,\" will perceive \"...nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.\"
\"The Black Cat\" is Poe\'s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt (the first being \"The Tell-Tale Heart\"); however, this story does not deal with premeditated murder. The reader is told that the narrator appears to be a happily married man, who has always been exceedingly kind and gentle.
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